Today, I emailed Craig Federighi about the ads in App Store search results as well as Apple Intelligence models eating up 30 GB on my Mac mini despite it being turned off.

Let's see if anyone listens.

Agreed, clickbait. The only reason I clicked the article was because I _didn’t_ see any new ads after upgrading iOS, so I was curious what they meant.

It's definitely an ad, but it's also been there for years now. And of all the ads I encountered across various platforms and spaces in real life, these are about the least obnoxious.

[dead]

I have a subscription to Apple+, 2 TB, $40 month plan.

I'm still getting the ads to upgrade my storage. Can't dismiss it. Why?

I've tried clicking them away and they keep coming back. E.g. my current watch is about to hit a year old and doesn't have Apple Care. I clicked away anything about the Apple Card in Wallet and I just had it sitting right at the top when I was trying to get to my boarding pass last week. I have no idea why it keeps telling me about Apple Fitness or Apple Music each time I purchase a new device, I was aware of it the last 6 times it tried to push those.

I don't mind a simple "You might be interested in these other services for your device" during initial setup. I do mind post set-up ads I have to click to disable in different places across my devices multiple times over time. It's just trashy.

From the article, many users report being unable to disable them:

> "Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered. There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work."

> "And unfortunately for users, that means more ads like this on their devices. While they are far from the most obnoxious ads around, the fact that many cannot be dismissed is clearly rubbing users the wrong way — as is the fact that the promos even exist at all in an Apple product.

There is also the possibility that at least some of these adverts are appearing due to a bug. The iCloud+ one in particular has drawn comments from users who are already subscribed to iCloud+ and thus, one would think, should not need to see any ads like this."

Anecdotally I have had this happen in the past, but not currently. I am particularly annoyed by the pattern where after an update it nags me to set up Siri, and the only way to remove the red notification icon is to partially progress through the setup before quitting. If you exit early the notification persists.

> Apple is trying to sell you 2 or 3 addons

That is precisely what an advertisement is, congratulations on identifying the issue.

People are being intentionally obtuse in order to find something to get mad about.

Obviously offering add-ons to your own product is not the same as "showing ads" by any common understanding of the term.

Otherwise literally every app that offers a free version or trial with some form of paid upgrade would be considered "showing ads" because there's an upgrade button somewhere in the app.

If you're going to call that "showing ads" then I would argue you've overloaded the definition to the point where it becomes meaningless.

Yeah I feel like this is the nuance that gets lost.

I hate ads, but mentioning other first party services feels very different than selling parts of the system UI like a billboard.

These service upsells should be dismissible but they seem fairly inoffensive. The App Store ads, on the other hand, are just atrocious